– Systems Are Manmade — – – You Can Change Systems When One Breaks Down –

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s April 1, 2020. We’re clearly in the midst of one of the most profound crises in modern history with the combined effects of a financial system that’s blowing out, and as well with the expanding pandemic of coronavirus. It’s clear that the old way of thinking no longer works. So, Helga, what’s your assessment, especially with the situation in the United States seeming to be heading out of control?

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It is an unprecedented crisis, and I think none of us has experienced anything like that in our lifetime. Maybe it was like that in the world wars, but it quickly is developing such a seriousness of the situation. I think that reality dawns on some people belatedly, but it is unavoidable, because the elements are that not only the coronavirus is hitting the United States and Europe, but it will really be extremely bad for the developing sector. We will come to that in a second. But I think first to start with the United States, yesterday’s White House coronavirus taskforce meeting, which was given by President Trump and his health advisors [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [Dr. Deborah] Birx was really completely sober and sobering. What they basically said is that if everything is being done right now, maybe the number of deaths can be reduced to 100,000 or 240,000 people. But if things go wrong, it may be 1-2 million. Right now, it does not look like this is going to be an easy job. If you look, for example, to situations like New York and New Jersey where you have the hotspots, with the highest infection rates exponentially growing right now, it is quite desperate. Despite Governor Cuomo trying to get sufficient ventilators for the expected outbreak, he said he was only able to get 2500 ventilators in two weeks from now from China, but that he is lacking 15,000. Obviously all the other states in the United States were in a bidding war to get ventilators until FEMA took it over, and is now organizing it centrally. Ventilators are in the critical phase of the coronavirus infection, that which is lifesaving. If there are no ventilators, then these people will just die. It is a very serious situation. For an industrialized country, it has unbelievable social consequences. For example, they let out the prisoners in Rikers Island, a famous prison, and they are now, because they have no other place to go, hanging out in Penn Station where they get food deliveries from the guardian angels. Then, you have 114,000 homeless children in New York alone, who used to get meals in the schools. So, you have all kinds of social consequences which really show the underlying problem of the lack of infrastructure investment, the privatization and dismantling of the health system over the last decades; all of that is now really coming to a point of complete crisis. There are incredible efforts being made to retool some of the industries, there is an air bridge which has been established with many planes from China and other Asian countries — 50 planes all together. There were yesterday, the first Russian airplane coming to the United States delivering medical support. So, there is an incredible mobilization going on, but it is also very clear that this is a pandemic, and you will have mass unemployment. Some people are saying that the unemployment in the United States may go up to 30%; so this is really an unbelievable crisis.

SCHLANGER: Helga, you talk about the crisis affecting the United States, and how desperate it is. What are we seeing now in countries like Africa? India has got a total lockdown; Indonesia is now in the midst of a developing crisis. This is obviously much more dangerous in the developing sector.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: If you think that the United States is a very well industrialized country — or, at least it used to be. If you go to Africa or the other developing areas of the world, supposedly developing, not so developing countries, it will be really very bad. You have some countries like South Africa, Kenya, Lagos is completely overwhelmed already, where you don’t have that kind of a health system. And you have already infectious diseases; you have HIV, tuberculosis, famine, malnutrition. This is really a powder keg. The head of the World Health Organization [WHO], Dr. Tedros, said that both in the United States and in Africa, the next two weeks will tell how bad the crisis will be. But so far, there is a certain delay factor, because of the poor transport connections of the African continent to the rest of the world, it arrived relatively late. But now it’s there, and there is the absolute danger that this will spread. You have half of the world de facto locked down; that’s incredible! You have India, a country of 1.3 billion people, in a lockdown. But that obviously is relative, because many day workers — people who just work for a day’s pay in big cities like Delhi — are now all fleeing these big cities, because they don’t earn any money, and they have absolutely no reserves. So you see these pictures where these poor people get on crowded buses, where they are absolutely not in a position to keep social distance, and then they are trying to rush home to their rural areas. But there is no health system. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Modi had quite some success with the “Clean India” campaign, and the “Modi Care” where he tried to improve the health care system, naturally this is all not enough. You have places like Jakarta in Indonesia — 10 million people in one city. Half of the people don’t have access to clean water. A similar situation is in many developing countries, including Mexico, including Peru. So, we are really looking at an unprecedented world crisis. The danger is that this will overwhelm the health systems; there is not enough production possible. The winter, which is now developing in the Southern Hemisphere, will favor the spread of the virus. You really will probably see many millions of people dying. I think this makes very clear that we need urgently a completely different system. Nothing will be like it was before. I think we have to go into a mass mobilization internationally; which the Schiller Institute is already engaged in, to establish a new world economic order. We have called for that for a very long time, but immediately in this situation it requires a summit of the most important powerful countries: China, Russia, India, the United States. They have to establish a new system. What we need is a completely new system. All the rules of the liberal economy, of the neo-liberal model, the cheap labor markets, the out-sourcing, all of that has to be replaced; and it has to start with the immediate building of a world health system where a decent health system is being built up in every single country. That must be the beginning of an industrial revolution for the whole world. Nothing short of that will do. That means we need a New Bretton Woods system, and a new credit system to finance that. If you agree with that, then help us in this mobilization, because what is at stake are the lives of many millions of people, and maybe yourself.

SCHLANGER: Over the last few days, President Trump had discussions with President Xi Jinping of China and President Putin of Russia. Do you see this as a positive step towards the idea of a summit? These are bilateral discussions, but so far we haven’t seen a response to your call on the level needed.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s a step in the right direction. The fact that Trump and Xi Jinping re-established contact, that there were discussions between the health ministers, that the United States started to accept this air bridge, that Trump started to discuss with Putin. All of these things are very positive, but they fall short. Also, the proposal by UNCTAD [UN Conference on Trade and Development], which proposed to have $2.5 trillion for building up the health sector in the developing sector, is a step in the right direction. $1 trillion is for debt write-off, $1 trillion is for Special Drawing Rights from the IMF, $500 billion is for a world health Marshall Plan. That is very positive, but when you count that, it’s still proverbial peanuts; because to build up a world health system needs much more than $500 billion. That’s for all the developing countries, not just for one country. It’s for the entire 180 or so developing countries; if you divide it, it’s just not enough.

SCHLANGER: There’s a lot of talk about the time lag in doing the emergency mobilization, getting the equipment, and other things. To me, the real time lag is the almost 45 years since your husband first sounded the warning in 1974 that a shift in the financial system to a neo-liberal new kind of colonial system would lead to this kind of pandemic. People obviously weren’t listening. The idea that there was no warning is completely false, isn’t it?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: The first memorandum that the economic financial policies of the IMF and World Bank would lead to pandemics, he issued in 1973. Then in 1974, he initiated a Biological Holocaust Taskforce, which presented their findings of a study at the end of 1974. I was just rereading a report which he also initiated in 1985, which is one of several large studies which absolutely predicted why this would happen. There is a connection between the biological sphere — the biosphere — and the economy. If you lower the living standard and the energy of the system of the economic society, then lower forms of life of the biosphere just take over. He compared it at that time, and I think this is a very fitting image for today, he said that the cheap labor orientation towards the developing sector and keeping development down in the so-called Third World, has to be compared to Schachtian economics in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. He said a lot of deaths in the concentration camps came from forcing the people sitting in these camps to do hard labor. They would have to do work for 2-3000 calories, but they would only get food for about 1000 calories. Then it was just a question of time before they would die of over-exhaustion. That is a fitting image, because if you lower the living standard of the developing countries unnecessarily by denying them infrastructure, like the World Wildlife Fund did in all their campaigns to ruin the prospects for dams, for industrial development, just blocking development with phony arguments of ecologism. What you do then is you reduce the ability of people to withstand diseases. You lower their immune system, you make them susceptible to pandemics, and this is exactly what we see today. That was clear; we discussed it in no uncertain terms. He said, these policies would have more consequences than the genocide of Adolf Hitler. I absolutely want to repeat that. When you see people today who are indifferent, who say “I don’t care. What do I care about Africa? What do I car about Latin America?”; these are people who are morally the equivalent of Nuremburg criminals. If you remember at the Nuremburg trials, the judges said, you either knew or should have known, about what was going on in the Third Reich. And concerning the condition of the developing sector, the exact same thing can be said. The people who are pushing no development, who are more concerned about the little snail in some corner than millions of people, these are people who are criminal. And that criminality absolutely has to stop. We have to start rebuilding the world. And every life in Africa, in Latin America, and in Asia is as precious as any child in Germany, or in the United States or any other place. I am consciously using this rather stark language, because this complacency and this arrogance of the Euro-centrists, or the American-centrists has to stop. We are at a point of moral and economic breakdown crisis of the whole world. We need a new system, and that has to be mobilized, and it has to be gotten through. If we don’t do that, we are risking our humanity either physically — because it is not yet clear if it doesn’t lead to war as a consequence of conditions of a breakdown crisis — or it leads to our moral demise. I really think that we have to absolutely change this. We have to allow industrial development in every single country in the world, and we have to have a decent living standard. It is very easy, because China has shown the way, that you can bring infrastructure development as the precondition for development to every country. It is up to us in the so-called Western countries in Europe and the United States to absolutely change our ways.

SCHLANGER: I think it’s also important going back to Lyn’s warnings in the early 1970s that he identified individuals who were committed to population reduction, knowing this would happen. We’re seeing some of these same kinds of comments. You had mentioned before, people talking about “Oh, isn’t it wonderful! There are now blue skies!” There are people who are cheering on the demise of the elderly and the so-called “useless eaters”, aren’t there?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: There is the flagship magazine of the British Empire, which is just coming out with that line today — {The Economist}. They say, isn’t it wonderful that the economy is coming to a grinding halt? No CO2 emissions. We just have to make sure that after this crisis, we are not going back to normal. There are some other criminal people who call themselves economists, who also say that if this crisis stops and is over, we have to rebuild the economy and it has to be all based on climate protection. We have discussed the reasons why the Green ecology is exactly what caused this crisis; and if we would go back to the same policies which have caused this crisis, then we clearly do not have the moral fitness to survive.

SCHLANGER: Helga, you’ve been talking about the rebuilding of the whole world health system. You had a conference call yesterday morning with young people, where you called on them to take responsibility for the organizing process to do this. What is your sense of the ability to mobilize youth today to take on this task?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think this was very encouraging, because this was the first such international youth call, and it had about 70-75 young people from all over the world; from the United States, Mexico, Peru, Pakistan, Africa, Europe, China. I think the discussion really reflected that these young people are morally absolutely committed to make sure that they have a future. The idea that every country has the right to have a decent health system is obvious. They are committed to bring this message to a lot of other young people, to the universities. They are committed to spread it other organizations, especially in the developing sector. All of them are really tuned in to the approach that you need the world leaders of the most important countries to change the system. I think this is important, because people have not really thought about it. You cannot sit out this crisis; you cannot just wait until it’s over. This is a pandemic, and it may come back in waves. It is intersected with the breakdown of the financial system, the collapse of the physical economy. The only to get out of that is to have a completely new system. Most people have not spent much thought on whether that is necessary or possible, or they say you can’t do that. Yes, you can do it. Systems are man-made; they are not built in the physical universe. They are man-made, and you can change the system. If the old system is not suitable for the common good of the people, then it has to be replaced. We have specified many times what that must look like: You need a global Glass-Steagall banking separation, you have to end the casino economy; you have to protect the commercial banks; you have to create a national bank in every country; you have to connect these national banks in a New Bretton Woods system which provides cheap long-term credit for clearly defined development projects. Then you have to have international cooperation. I think among the young people in particular, the idea that cooperation has to replace confrontation is a very easily understood idea. There were several especially young women — which made me especially happy, because I’m all for woman-power — and they especially emphasized that the passion which needs to be mobilized for that is agape. The change which has to occur must be based on a love for humanity. In this discussion, you could get an inkling of what the kind of new system will be like; namely, that the geopoliticians will be out. The people that think you can start endless wars just to make profit, this is an obsolete idea of troglodytes. The future must belong to young people who organize the world in different ways, in the interests of each country and vice versa. That was actually a very hopeful call, and I would urge people to get in contact with us to see how they can join it.

SCHLANGER: When you talk about troglodytes, look at what’s going on in Europe with the European Union; the battles that are going on around the continuation of the neo-liberal policies. This is in complete contrast to what you’re discussing with the young people, the complete absence of agape. Catch us up a little bit on what’s going on in the EU.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It’s almost a question of the past to talk about the EU. It’s really right now a question mark as to how long this construct will remain in place. There is no solidarity; there is a big feud right now between Germany and Italy, France, and the other southern European countries. It’s a little bit on the wrong issue; namely, this issue of Eurobonds, which I think is not a good idea. It’s still in the realm of banking bail-out. Just to mention in parentheses, the Federal Reserve just yesterday opened their repo credit facility to all other central banks. That means basically that they intend to help each other to bail each other out. The Federal Reserve earlier had allocated $4 trillion for the bail-out of the U.S. banking sector which was characterized by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie as the biggest transfer of wealth from the ordinary people to the very rich and the bankers. This is part of the Eurobonds, so I’m not in favor of the Eurobonds. The conflict which has arisen between Germany and Holland and Austria on the one side, and these other countries on the other side, pertains to a real issue. That is that obviously the countries of the south — especially Italy and Spain, and increasingly also France — are really suffering an incredible exponential growth rate of this virus, and they have demanded some finance mechanism organized by the EU, which was blocked by Germany in particular and Holland and Austria. So, what these countries are saying is, this is the ugly face of Europe. The tone becomes quite nasty. For example, the Italian media and I think also Prime Minister Conte were saying that if that would have been the attitude of the other European countries at the 1953 debt conference in London, where half of the German debt was forgiven, which obviously was an extremely important factor in the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War, if that had not been done, then Germany would still live on the garbage piles. So, the tone is becoming nasty, and everybody — Italy, Spain, Serbia — all say that they got more help from China, from Russia, from Cuba, even the small country of Albania was sending 30 health personnel to Italy to help. You can really see who is your friend, and who is completely only motivated by other reasons. This will remain, and I think this anti-China campaign which is coming from Pompeo, from {Foreign Affairs} magazine, from the Council on Foreign Relations, who are all still in this absolutely vicious campaign against China, I think that will vanish. Because people in this crisis see who is helping, and who is not. I think the situation in Europe maybe in a week or two weeks when we talk next time, the EU may not exist. That’s not a bad thing, because it was a bad construction from the very beginning. It could not work. It never existed. There is no European people. There are many nations and many cultures, but the European bureaucracy is an evil structure which is not in correspondence to the interests of their own members. The sooner it is replaced by something else — either a Eurasian alliance of sovereign states from the Chinese Sea to Vladivostok to Lisbon — or some other kind of new alliance of sovereign republics working together for a new world economic order. That does not mean that European countries cannot work together, but they should not be under the tutelage of some supranational structure. I think we will see big changes in this coming period. It requires the active intervention of as many state citizens as possible. So, please get in contact with us and help us to try to change the agenda on a large scale.

SCHLANGER: Toward accomplishing that goal, the Schiller Institute is going to have an international conference April 25-26. Just give us a little bit of a sense of what you hope to come out of that conference with.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: We had to shift that conference which was planned for sometime, to be an internet conference, because you can’t have physical conferences at this point. But in that lies also an advantage; namely, that you can reach much larger audiences. Therefore, people should start to register for that conference, because then you will be also supplied with additional information and materials you can read ahead of time to be prepared to participate as a more active person in this conference. What we will try to do is, we will try to discuss the issues at that conference which we think should be taken up these large governments. So, we will try to inform the population on the needed changes in the strategic alliance, the needed cultural changes, the need to go to a Classical renaissance of art and music. We will discuss the frontiers of science; what is necessary to defeat not only the coronavirus, but to really get a completely different sense of space medicine, of breakthroughs in optical biophysics in redefining what life is. What do we need to know to be able to combat such problems much better? And naturally, what must be the principles of physical economy when we rebuild the world economy. So, you should definitely get in touch with us, register for the conference, and be part of it.

SCHLANGER: I would encourage everyone to join this mobilization with a very simple thing. Share this webcast! Pass it around! Get your friends to watch it. Then, go to the Schiller Institute website, the LaRouche PAC website, and study these ideas. It’s these ideas which were generated from Lyndon LaRouche back in the 1960s and 1970s that are not only valid, but represent universal principles. It’s through a return to those kinds of principles that we can restore mankind. Helga, thank you very much for your comments and for joining us today. As you always say, hopefully we’ll see you next week.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, let’s do something to move mankind in a better direction.